The biggest clue that Google+ was long dead — Google's top executives stopped using it up to 3 years ago

Google announced it is shutting down Google+ for after The Wall Street Journal reported that it left users’ data exposed.

Some observers online were surprised to hear it still existed at all.

You need only look at how Google’s top executives have stopped using Google+ to see it was an unloved child.

The tech world was rocked by another privacy scandal on Monday — this time on an unexpected platform.

Google totally dominates many areas of our online lives, and Google+ was its attempt to break into social media. But it was seen as one of Google’s biggest failures and now, it has had an unhappy ending.

The Wall Street Journal revealed that the data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users had been left exposed for three years, from 2015 to March 2018. Not only that, but Google decided against informing the public about the vulnerability.

Indeed, the writing has been on the wall for some time. You need only look at how Google’s top executives have stopped using Google+ to see it was an unloved child.

It was once the go-to platform for the latest pronouncements of Google’s senior managers, but some went silent on the social network around three years ago. Here’s when Google’s top team stopped using Google+:

We’re deeply saddened about the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia – @googleorg and Googlers are donating $1M to support relief efforts, and we’ve activated our SOS Alerts to provide emergency info to those impacted

Cofounder Sergey Brin — last posted September 2017

Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Of all the big Google cheeses, Brin seems to be the last to have abandoned Google+, his last post being just over a year ago. The post was about the Ragged Islands in the Bahamas taking the brunt of Storm Irma.